Using Marketo vs. another email platform for communicating with customers

[Anonymous]

I wanted to send a communication to a list of existing clients but a few in the list are blocked because they have unsubscribed from Marketing emails.

Does anyone have best practices on how to communicate with clients vs. prospects in Marketo? Is there a way to mark them as a client that would override the marketing unsubscribe? Or would it be best not to use Marketo at all for customer communication---perhaps use another tool like Mailchimp for strictly customer communication? Our CRM is SFDC and Mailchimp syncs with SFDC apparently. Would love to hear what other folks are doing! Thanks.

[Aslihan_Ayan_Ha]

I agree with Ed. The nature of your customer communication will determine if you should mark them as operational and bypass the unsubscribes.

However if it is a cross and/or up sell programs, the emails should not be operational. If any of your customers do not want to receive promotional emails, I don't think you should email them. Maybe try to get them subscribe them back in thru Real-Time Personalization and offer compelling reason to come back to your marketable database.   

[Edward_Masson]

if your communicating with customers about their products they have purchased/product announcements etc. this can be considered operation email sends.

Think of it like this: I want to receive account updates from my bank but I don't want to get marketed to with mortgages, credit cards etc. I only what to get emails relating to my account. So I unsubscribe from their marketing.

You need to set your product announcements emails as operational which will by-pass your unsubscribes and Marketing Suspended list.

Be careful here, make sure you don't market to your unsubscribe/marketing suspended lists.

Please check out this post

[Anonymous]

Also I have to add that we have multiple products and do cross-selling campaigns to clients, so there will be cases where we will want to use Marketo for customer communications.